The Show That Knew How to Hurt You
It opens in Morocco—heat, dust, weed, Franky losing her virginity and Mini losing her edge and all of them briefly becoming the versions of themselves they’d been trying to perform all of series five. Then a wealthy drug dealer enters the picture, Grace’s headmaster-daughter caution dissolves at exactly the wrong moment, and the whole holiday tips into something irreversible. Matty runs. Everyone else comes home. Bristol in January is a different kind of grey after that.
Series six of Skins started on E4 tonight, and I’ve already seen the first episode. No other show has ever gotten inside my head the way this one has—made me turn small moments over for days, made me genuinely grieve for fictional teenagers I’ll never meet. That sounds embarrassing when I write it out. It’s still true.
The first two generations hit harder for me personally. Tony and Sid and Cassie and Effy felt like people I recognized, from school, from my own particular brand of adolescent wreckage. The third generation took a while. Series five was sometimes too loose, mistaking style for emotional weight. But they’re getting there. Mini has transformed from a genuinely unbearable high-school tyrant into someone I actually want to watch. The arc feels earned.
Franky is falling apart in the way this show does best: quietly, sideways, through bad decisions that each make perfect sense in the moment. Her relationship is fracturing, she’s pulling inward, becoming available to the wrong people. Liv is still Liv—a little reckless, a little slutty in the show’s affectionate way, the person who actually sees what’s happening to everyone else while nobody sees what’s happening to her. She’s the best character in this generation and the least celebrated.
The second season of any Skins generation is always darker—it’s the structural logic of the thing, the moment when consequences land. I’m glad. The lighter tone of series five sometimes felt like the show was stalling. Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain know what they’re doing, and what they’re doing this year looks like it might genuinely hurt. I’m ready for that.